St Michael and All Angels
St James Church, October 4, AD 1981
by Rev Dr Robert Darwin Crouse
“There was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels, and prevailed not...” Rev. 12:7
The Feast of St . Michael and All Angels, or St Michael’s Mass (Michaelmas, as it is commonly called) is one of the great festivals of the Christian year, and for many of our forefathers, it was a day of great celebration – one of the high points of the year. Nowadays, however, angels receive very little attention: certainly not a degree of attention commensurate with the prominence they have in sacred scripture and in the theological and devotional tradition of the Church. I suppose that is because we don’t understand very well what angels are all about and why they are important.
For many modern people, I think, angels seem to be a kind of poetic fiction, creatures of the imagination, appropriate perhaps to mystical vision, but fundamentally impractical and irrelevant. That is the point made by those supposed wits who tell us about Medieval scholastics debating how many angels could stand on the head of a pin. Of course, the story is nonsense: no Medieval schoolmen ever debated that question – they were perfectly aware that purely spiritual beings do not occupy space. But the force of the witticism lies in the common assumption that talk about angels is the ultimate in the impractical and irrelevant. And I think that assumption is very widely shared. We modern people, it seems, never encounter angels, and if we entertain any, we do it unawares.
Why, then, must we keep such a feast as this and why must we think about angels? Who, or what, are angels, and why are they important? Those are difficult questions, and the answers, I’m afraid, don’t come easily. Angels are purely spiritual beings, and we do not easily think of purely spiritual beings. And how are we to describe a purely spiritual being? All our descriptions will involve images from earthly experience of things which we can see and touch, and so on.
When we read in scripture of the appearances of angels – to Abraham, to St. Mary, to St. Paul, and so on – they seem to be described as thought they were human beings. Sometimes, in prophetic vision, they are described as living creatures having wings. But these are just the forms of their appearing: they appear in human forms, because they are rational beings; they appear with wings to suggest that their life belongs to a higher and freer sphere than ours. But they are not human beings, and they are certainly not literally equipped with wings. They are purely spiritual beings.
Perhaps the closest we usually come to thinking of spiritual beings is when we think of concepts or ideas, or what people nowadays often call “values”, ideas of goodness, or truth, or beauty, and so on. But perhaps we tend to think of these as subjective products of our own thinking or imagination. If you can think of these ideas as objective, as inherent in the very nature and order of the universe, you come close to what we really mean by angels. They are the ideas or principles by which God orders and governs the whole of reality, down to the least particular. They are God’s minsters, God’s agents, God’s messengers in the created order.
They are the products of God’s thinking, not ours – they are living, substantial, governing ideas: the ideas of creation as it truly is in the providence of God. Thus, when we speak of our guardian angel, what we really mean is our true self as known and cherished in the mind of God. I think that’s what the Gospel text refers to when Jesus speaks of the angels of the little ones always beholding the face of the heavenly Father. Angels are the principles and agencies of God’s providential knowledge and love, and that is what we celebrate when we keep this festival.
But our text from the Revelation of St. John speaks of war in heaven – conflict among those transcendent principles – “Michael and his angels fought against the dragon.” It seems that there are bad angels as well as good; and the bad angels we call “demons”, principles of spiritual wickedness, “rulers of the darkness of this world”, as St. Paul says. But there are no simply bad angels: evil exists only as a perversion of the good. Satan himself was chief of the angels, “Lucifer”, the light bearer. His wickedness is a perversion of good – the perverted will of finite creature to be absolute, to be God.
“The dragon fought and his angels, and prevailed not, neither was their place found any more in heaven.” That is to say, evil has no ultimate reality: it exists only as a perversion of the good. It does not escape the providence of God, who, in his almighty power, makes good even from our evil. We live in conflict of good and bad; but this festival of St. Michael assures us that the truth and goodness of God are not thwarted, and that is surely something to celebrate.
Now, in what I’ve been saying about angels, I suppose I’ve been doing what some modern theologians call “demythologizing”. But I do not mean that we should give up our images, our picture language about angels. Those who destroy the traditional imagery of religion finish up with a very impoverished religion, or none at all. The traditional imagery contains a depth and richness which our efforts at understanding never even begin to exhaust, and is therefore to be cherished. It is not our business to abolish it, or to try to replace it with something else; but simply to do our best to understand what it is we celebrate.
By all means, let us celebrate the heavenly warrior, St. Michael, and that great host of agents of spiritual good who exist for the everlasting praise of God. May that great company of spiritual principles which serves God’s providence, succour and defend us in our earthly conflicts. “Blessed Michael, Archangel, defend us in the day of battle.”
Amen +
